Five Mobile SEO Best Practices

Hi, I’m Chris and today I’m going to talk to you about some mobile SEO best practices. With smartphones becoming ever faster and ever more sophisticated, it’s always a good idea for site owners to start thinking about a mobile version of their site and search visibility in mobile searches. With that in mind, I’m going to talk to you about some of the top ideas that I have when starting a mobile search campaign. The first thing is to make sure that the site is actually mobile friendly. One way you can do this is with a responsive design, just like the Koozai site.

Another way that you can do this is to make a completely mobile version of your site. When you do this, you need to consider that there’s a lot less real estate on the page, and what I mean by that is there’s a lot less space because the screen is a lot smaller. So actually, when you’re considering the design of the site, you need to make sure that you can actually click the buttons a lot easier and that the content is a lot more succinct.

The other thing to consider is making sure that, at the keyword research stage, you’re thinking about mobile intent as well, as mobile search keywords are actually about 25% shorter and quite often they actually reflect the location of the searches as well.

With location in mind, mobiles; they’re mobile. You use them when you’re out and about. That’s kind of the point of them. So what you need to do is you need to think where business needs meet them, such as the localised versions of your searches. One way to do this is using geolocation tags, using Google Places accounts and things like that, and also thinking at the keyword stage, again, the local versions of the keywords that you can maybe use.

Another thing to consider whilst you’re out and about is that most of the time mobile smartphones will be using cellular data, so page speed is even more important than it ever used to be. A faster site will actually, obviously load quicker and also it will be crawled easier by search engines, and also then have higher usability and higher search rankings.

Even with 4G, if you’ve got a slow site, your site speed is going to be noticeably slower than others, and this will affect your rankings and also usability.

The final thing that I thought to mention today was social, because social is becoming evermore important to every aspect of SEO, and the fact that most people use their mobile phones to send tweets, to update their Facebook statuses, and for some strange reason take photos of their food on Instagram. One thing that I would consider when making a mobile site is that you make sure that there are social buttons and they’re easy to push, they’re easy to share your content, easy to get your social signals out, and from the user’s perspective, they’re much easier for them to say where they are and that they’re using your product and things like that.

This way you’re increasing your links, you’re increasing your social signals, and also including your site in social networks as well. If you want to read more about this, you can always read my blog on the subject, and if you want to share this, you can also use the sharing buttons at the bottom of the page. Thanks for listening.

That’s a really nice viewport resizer tool – thanks for the link! Responsive sites are going to be more and more important as devices keep changing shape.

Windows 8 has a ‘snapping option’ that allows users to view two windows side by side on a tablet – it’s likely that knowing how your website renders in this mode will be another new important factor to consider.

Hi Sii, Glad you like the tool. I think responsive is the only logical way forward. Especially as each major manufacturer looks to stick a spanner in the works with slightly different screen sizes on each evolution of their products.

The Windows 8 ‘Snapping Option’ sounds interesting! Would like to give that a try!

Thanks for the comments. @Csrweb – I think that the best way forward is to use a well planned responsive design for your site. I agree that a dedicated version is a lot more work (you are pretty much doubling it). A great tool for testing responsive designs can be found here if that’s useful to you? http://lab.maltewassermann.com/viewport-resizer/

What do you think?

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